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Tuesday, December 8, 2015

The question that's never asked. The answer that's never given.

Couric: earns millions in the propaganda industry

I just saw a clip of Katie Couric, a US newscaster asking the politician Rand
Paul, about Trump’s call for stopping all Muslims from entering the US. He
doesn't agree but he does say there needs to be "stricter scrutiny" and that “I think there are a lot of people hell-bent on attacking us, and we do
have to review who is coming, and how many people come, and where they come
from,”

If this newscaster was anything but a mouthpiece for the US
state department and US corporate foreign policy, the next question should have
been "Why would so many people be
hell bent on attacking us, Senator Paul?"

The problem is that this question is a dodgy one.It demands an answer that can pose problems. The
imbecile Bush’s answer to this question was because we are "free." People in
other countries hate us because of our freedoms he said that more than
once.The other important reason for
their hatred of our way of life according to Bush was that they’re “evil.”

After the horrific attacks we collectively know as 911 these
childish answers worked for millions of Americans whose knowledge of the
outside world and our government’s activities in it is practically non-existent.
But we are 15 years on and for politicians like Paul and others who do not
believe the lies they tell their own constituents, there has to be a better
alternative. Trillions has been spent, Americans have died. The world is a
mess.

So we have terrorism driven by religious hatred. This is
primarily a religious war; it’s the crusades all over again.Muslims are backward medieval zealots and
their goal is to dominate the world.

This is much better than evil in the abstract but that’s
what most Americans believed when they asked me, an English immigrant, about
the situation in Northern Ireland. Protestants and Catholics just couldn’t get
along, it was a religious struggle.This
was also the general idea fed to the British public that was even closer to
that conflict geographically. It is a religious, not an economic issue. And the
English bourgeois always portrayed the Irish as lesser human beings. I
explained to my American friends (after I became fully aware of it myself) that
it would be most likely that a Catholic or Protestant worker wouldn’t have a
clue about the main theological differences between the two versions of
Christianity (confession aside) but the Catholic would know that they got worse
housing, worse jobs, and were socially discriminated against in many other ways
Protestants weren’t. Protestants no doubt knew it too but had the ideology of
British imperialism and religious prejudice to fall back on. Once we see the
economics behind events like these things become much clearer.

In order for me to understand this I had to gain further
knowledge of the historical relationship between Britain (the English really)
and Ireland.The occupation of Ireland
for centuries by the British, the taking of their land then charging them for
living on it, mass murder and violence etc. There is much to know about this
history and why the 6 counties in the North are still part of the UK. To the average
Irish person, this history is rooted deep in their consciousness.

I don’t know how many times people here in the US say to me
with confidence that Jews and Muslims will never live together they’ve been
fighting this war for centuries---a thousand years one person told me. This is
completely false as anyone who delves in to it knows. The mass media could
inform us but the truth is dangerous for those that own the media. Muslims and
Jews lived in relative harmony for generations. It was the creation of the
state of Israel, the emergence and domination of Zionism and what is basically
a European colonial settler state, that changed this. It is Christian Europe
that has a history of slaughtering Jews and waged a genocidal war against them,
not Arabs or Muslims.

Once we understand these truths it allows us to understand
the world as it really is, why Israel is an ally of US imperialism. Why Ireland
is divided. The cause of events are clear. Science allowed us to see that
lightning was not god’s anger as the religious authorities told us but a
product of real and explainable phenomena. For centuries those seeking these answers,
for daring to question the wisdom of the servants of god could lose their
lives, better keep quiet.

But the truth sets you free as they say and eventually the liars are exposed.
That’s why we have to ask ourselves the question “Why are people attacking us?”
We should have asked that after September 11th 2001.Those like Katie
Couric and Rand Paul know the real reason and it’s their job to obscure it. It’s
why we have to seek the answer ourselves and that answer will be fundamentally
different from the answer Rand Paul, Barack Obama, George W Bush or Donald
Trump would give.

That is also why Katie Couric won’t ask the question. Better
leave it alone.

1 comment:

It might be useful to look north and see how Canada, the Canadian government, and - most important - the Canadian people are addressing similar issues. The government is committed to admitting tens of thousands of Syrian refugees, starting now, and is processing families to arrival before the end of the year. In addition, the Canadian people, as groups, as municipalities, etc. are organizing to privately sponsor and help resettle refugee families, as they did for Bosnia and Vietnam. Individual families are already arriving, both in rural and urban Canadian communities.